You’re already managing clients, customers, workshops, and your blog while maintaining your marketing efforts, too. It takes a lot to run a small business, and we’re here to help.
We’ve put together over 100 free digital marketing tools to help you sell online.
From visual content to design, blogging, writing and editing to SEO. There’s something here for everyone.
Take a gander through our list and be sure to bookmark this page.
Digital Marketing Tools for Design
1. Canva is a free cloud-based design tool. Use it to mock up your eBook cover or to create your social media marketing designs. Canva is truly endless in the value it provides.
2. Unsplash uploads 10 high-resolution photos every 10 days, which can be used for anything. Any images downloaded on Unsplash can be uploaded to Canva to create a custom eBook cover or marketing design.
3. Gratisography is another free image site, boasting beautiful and edited designs. All images are free to use in any commercial project.
4. PicJumbo provides totally free images for commercial and personal works.
5. PhotoPin lets you search thousands of images from Flickr with a Creative Commons license.
6. All The Free Stock includes not only images but also includes stock videos.
7. Jay Mantri provides beautiful travel images.
8. Travel Coffee Book is full of gorgeous images.
9. Mazwai: Free HD videos and clips.
10. Skitch from Evernote helps you get your point across with fewer words. We use Skitch for our Support site.
Digital Marketing Tools for Image Optimization
11. TinyJPG or TinyPNG compress your images for you.
12. Compressor.io optimizes and compresses your images online.
13. Smush.it is an image optimizer WordPress plugin.
Blogging Tools
14. Medium curates stories and ideas.
15. Quora is a great resource for finding blogging ideas.
16. Portent Title Maker helps you come up with funny and engaging title makers. Refresh the ideas as often as you like until you hit one that you can run with.
17. Quick Sprout shows you how your website is doing in terms of shares, SEO, and speed. Great for checking on your site’s performance.
18. WordPress.com and WordPress.org provide free websites.
You also get a free blog with your Selz store.
19. Dropbox is great for stockpiling your ideas. Since Dropbox is in the cloud and can sync with any device, you can have your ideas on the road with you and access them as long as you have an internet connection.
20. Google Docs helps you collaborate with other bloggers or people on your team. Edit your post at the same time.
21. ZenPen is a cloud-based editing tool.
22. Buzzsumo analyzes what content performs best for any topic or competitor.
23. Disqus helps you build a community of active readers and commenters on your blog.
Digital Marketing Tools for Writing and Editing
24. Grammarly helps you write better by catching grammatical errors that Word can’t. Since Grammarly is added to your browser, it helps your writing be better across all channels, whether you’re writing a blog post or an email campaign.
25. Evernote is a cloud-based workspace to write notes, to-do lists, and drafts. I love it for brain dumping any and all of my ideas! Capture quotes and ideas, too.
26. Scrivener is a tool for helping you finish your first awkward draft of any long, difficult document.
27. Hemingway App helps make your writing bold and clear. We use this tool all the time with blog posts, guides, and even emails. What I appreciate the most about the Hemingway App is that you improve your writing every time you use it.
Digital Marketing Tools for SEO
28. Link Explorer is a great tool for link analysis.
29. WordPress SEO by Yoast gives you training wheels and a score for your blog post or page’s SEO on WordPress.
30. SEO Checkup: See how your SEO is doing for free.
31. Google for the win. Use their Analytics, Search Console, and Trends.
32. Find broken links on your website.
Read more: It’s Not SEO Magic: 3 Ways to Improve Your Site for Search
Branding Tools
Logo
33. Free Squarespace logo design: Simple logo design made on the web.
34. Logaster helps you create a logo for free.
35. Strikingly gives you free, mobile-optimized websites. These are great for side projects, retreats, and programs.
36. Hipster Logo Generator. The name says it all.
37. Withoomph creates sweet logos for free. Then, download them for anywhere between $30-$75.
Name Your Business or Product
38. The Name App generates potential names for your next business or project.
39. Wordoid helps you come up with made-up names for a unique twist on your business or project.
Email Marketing Tools
40. Mailchimp
41. Campaign Monitor
42. AWeber
43. Madmimi
44. Hello Bar
Social Media Digital Marketing Tools
Social Media Scheduling Tools
46. Buffer‘s free plan lets you schedule your social media across the channels of your choosing.
47. Hootsuite helps you get serious about social.
Social Media Advertising Tools
48. Facebook Ads help target specific audiences for reading blog posts, visiting your website, and signing up for your newsletter.
49. Twitter Ads: Promote your products and website on Twitter by targeting specific accounts.
50. Instagram Ads: Open only to large businesses, Instagram ads are something to keep on your radar for the future. More on Insta ads here.
51. Selz Managed Advertising will work with you to place ads on the right platforms with the right copy and images for growing sales.
Digital Marketing Tools for Productivity
52. Trello: Flexible and visual way to organize anything with anyone.
53. Pomodoro Technique is a common strategy for productivity, especially in the world of modern entrepreneurs working for themselves. We all want to do more with less time and this technique can help you do that.
54. Slack is like an online forum for your growing business which allows you to have different channels and conversation threads depending on who you are working with, and what you are talking about.
55. Time Out Free for Mac is a Mac application to provide micro-breaks. Taking breaks throughout your day has been shown to increase creativity.
56. Coffitivity provides coffee shop ambiance without having to leave your home. If background noise helps you be more productive, Coffitivity will work wonders for you.
57. Noisli: Mix different background noises for productivity.
58. Noizio: Block out the noise with nature sounds.
Continuing Education
59. Udemy
60. CreativeLive
61. Skillshare
62. Khan Academy
63. Coursera
More SEO Tools for Ecommerce
65. Screaming Frog crawls your website to help you update your meta descriptions, broken links, and more.
66. Another great plug-in for SEO, Rank Math is an excellent tool that offers these simple instructions for an SEO audit.
67. Ahrefs can help you figure out your most popular pages, keywords, and what your competitors are ranking for.
68. One of the first steps to SEO is keywords. Ubersuggest is a helpful keyword tool.
69. Another great keyword tool? Soovle.
70. SEO can take some time to learn. Start with this free guide, and take some time with the free resources from Backlinko.
Infographics Tools
71. Visme
72. Adobe Spark
73. For inspiration for your infographics, check out Information is Beautiful
74. Visual Capitalist also has some great infographics inspo.
Free Video Marketing Tools
75. OpenShot
76. Avidemux
77. InVideo
78. Headliner
79. ClipChamp
80. Typito
81. Biteable
82. Animaker
More Tools to Improve Your Content
84. For help researching, Paper.Li
85. AllTop
86. To find and create lists, Listly
87. For more great videos, photos, and audio clips, check out Creative Commons
88. Still don’t quite have the budget for Photoshop? Try Gimp.
Audio Tools for Marketing
89. Audacity for editing sound for video or podcasts
90. Looking for other options? Try Oceanaudio or
91. Wavepad
92. Want to add some energy to your sound editing? Check out sound effects and music here from Freesound
93. Audioblocks
94. Soundbible
Our Favorite Digital Marketing Blogs
95. To round out the list, we want to share some of our favorite digital marketing blogs. Have you checked out Whiteboard Fridays?
96. Hubspot
97. MarketingLand
98. Content Marketing Institute
99. Copyblogger
100. Marketing Profs
101. Duct Tape Marketing
103. FounderU
Are there any other digital marketing tools that you’d like to add to our list? Let us know here.
Want to check out some of our favorite digital marketing videos? Check out our How to Sell Online playlist.
This post was originally published in October 2015 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Tara Storozynsky
Hi Anju, glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading FounderU.
anju chauhan
Thanks for the crucial article.
Bryce Patterson
Great to hear you found this post helpful- thanks for checking us out and commenting!
Chima Ezuo
Everything about this post is awesome. I have learnt so much and I am already implementing them. Kristen thank you for sharing.
Hanna Whirty
Gloria, we’re so glad you found it informative! Thanks so much for reading and make sure you check out the rest of FounderU. If you ever have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
Gloria Timmangao
I learned a lot by reading, now i have to put it into action and i need your help as i go on.
hank you very much!!
Kristen DeCosta
Thanks for reading and commenting, Sheila! I hope you find this list helpful :)
Sheila blackstar
Great list.
Will go through each of the items.
Thankks
Kristen
Hi Bryant, thanks for your comment. If you want to only share a short preview for your item preview, you must edit the file yourself as the file uploaded to the item preview is what will be played.
bryant hawkins
The advertisement is giving the entire song instead of a sample be for sell complete. How do I correct this?
David Charbonneau
Much appreciated
Kristen
Hey Michael! You bet :) Hope you’re doing well!
Kristen
Hey Gini, thanks for stopping by! This resource list will be here for when you need it… :)
Kristen
Nice one, G. Thanks for sharing your book!
Kristen
Hey Kola, thanks for your comment and thanks for sharing the love! :)
Kristen
Hey Judi, thanks for stopping by and for the comment :) Enjoy the resources… there are so many good ones in there!
Kristen
Glad you found is useful, David! Be sure to bookmark this page as we’ll be updating it often.
Judi Singleton
Great resources. Thanks so much for posting them. Judi
Kola Olaosebikan
holy molly! This is the most useful blog post I’ve read in a WHILE! Sharing. thank you so much xx
G. Darrell Berglund
For Your Continuing Education section:
“The Harvard JD/MBA Book On Attracting Life And Luck!” ©™
By Harvard JD/MBA LLC ©™
Virginia (Gini) Kaplan
The above list is long, and I am new and small…. So, no, I don’t have any other ideas; this many is already daunting. However, I want you to know I am “hanging in there”. I will not quit. And I appreciate you sending me emails very much! Thank you. I’ll write soon about what I need help figuring out. Gini
Michael DiGiacomo
Thanks Kristen.
This is very helpful!